Twitter lists have been around for a couple weeks now and until this point I only somewhat understood how to effectively use them. When they first came out I jumped in, made a few lists of my own and moved on not taking any significant time to explore them until now. What I have since found are that Twitter lists can be very useful.

It’s a known fact that following any number of people can produce a lot of noise. Add business Twitter accounts to the stream and many Tweets are drowned out and never read. The thing is, sometimes the noise is a benefit providing a shared link, resource or inspiration. Twitter lists allows the best of both worlds, the ability to organize groups of followers into broad or very defined categories to easily view a specific live feed of Tweets through the Twitter.com site. Previously the best method for oranizing groups of people or businesses on Twitter was to use a 3rd party services like Tweetdeck, Seesmic or Twibes. With lists being centralized at Twitter.com it makes them much more public, powerful and accessible through the Twitter API.

Brilliant. Here’s where I think it gets interesting, as Twitter lists grow in popularity they are becoming a very important metric to determine Twitter credibility and a great way to discover people and brands within nearly any category. The new site Listorious has jumped at the task of organizing lists for discovery. I’m excited to see how this plays out, I see some very popular category lists forming that will be valuable to sort just about any topic.

Here’s some continued reading…

• 10 ways you can use Twitter lists: http://mashable.com/2009/11/04/twitter-lists-uses/
• What Twitter lists say about you: http://www.mustexist.com/list_tags
• Top Twitter users based on followers: http://twitterholic.com/
• Top 237 Twitter users who will follow you back: http://socialnewswatch.com/top-twitter-users/
• Directory of the best Twitter lists: http://listorious.com/

With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and hundreds of other broad and niche social networks out there it becomes an important task to figure out what is relevant, how to engage and respect each online community while maintaining a consistent brand across them all, and somehow pull it all back together. Is what we’re doing today going to work tomorrow? The only constant is change. Facebook and Twitter are powerful now, are they going anywhere immediately? No. Will they be around forever? Only if they evolve to something else.

All of this swirling thought mixed with the desire to coach social media newcomers the best, and most simple way to put this whole plan together, I decided to reign in my own social media presence; my brand. The following is what I feel are essential for any company or person staking a piece of Internet pie..

• Personal Website
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Additional Recommendations

• Yelp
• Google Profile
• Many various niche networks

Mentioned before, create consistency and interact. Interlink your personal website with your LinkedIn profile, give Facebook users a way to access your Twitter, etc.. That said I personally want to give all of the users from these networks a place to gather where I have the most control and ownership of the content. That thought lead me to create a “/me” page, a custom landing page on my own personal domain for all of my social network friends and visitors where I can control the content. I have the freedom of adding personal and company sites, projects and additional ways to connect while collecting analytics. I’m not the first person to create a custom landing page for social networks but it is something I am surprised not to see more of. The goal of this page is to provide the most targeted and most useful information to the visitor, immediately. Visit my “/me” page and let me know.

One step towards a complete social media plan.